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2018:Year of Change - part 2

posted 10 Jan 2018, 03:16 by Bristol Old Vic Theatre Club

This is part 2 of 3 of our report
on the launch of Bristol Old Vic’s 2018 programme. We continue to focus on BOV’s
own productions in this historic year during which the theatre is literally
opened up to the city for the first time since it was built almost 252 years
ago.

In October Twelfth Night will be co-produced with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and directed by The
Lyceum’s Associate Director Wils
Wilson. The year will end and lead us into 2019 with a new version of A Christmas Carol, for which the
creative team is due to be announced shortly.

2018 as a Year of Change is inspired by
the anniversaries of some significant and powerful advocates for change; the 50th anniversaries of the assassination of Martin
Luther King and the Black Power salute, the 70th anniversary of the voyage of the Windrush,
the centenary of women’s suffrage and the bicentenary of the birth of the
abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Bristol Old Vic is participating in a
city-wide process, re-examining our relationship with our past and, alongside
many others in the city, resolving to look afresh at Bristol’s involvement in
the transatlantic slave trade, which made it so wealthy and contributed so
strongly to many of its most beautiful buildings, including our theatre.

BOV’s ambition as a theatre is to be a
place where the city can hold itself, its history and its future to account,
and where those histories can be re-understood, so it is pleased that the Year
of Change programme can also accommodate this powerful and important conversation.

As part of that conversation, Bristol
Old Vic has commissioned a major new play. See the February edition for a
report on that and related activities.